‘We’ll be like Che’ Foquismo and sacrificial ethics within the Latin American revolutionary activism

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the double dimension – political and moral – that the Guevarist legacy assumed within the Latin American left in the 60s and 70s. First, it identifies those postulates emanating from Guevarist rhetoric that offered both a language and a political sense to the revolutionary left, thus promoting armed action. What fundamentally stands out, among those postulates, is the inclusion of the revolutionary process in a war on a continental and global scale, as well as the foquist assertion that the armed action from the revolutionaries creates the subjective conditions for the revolution. Secondly, the article approaches a central figure of the revolutionary imaginary erected as a model of conduct: the new man. By addressing this dual legacy, the aim is to illuminate the particular forms in which the thought and action of Guevara shaped a political subjectivity and sacrificial ethics for thousands of Latin American revolutionaries.